Group Hunt

This excerpt is from the upcoming sequel to The Succubus and the Seminarian. It features the two protagonists of Incubus. In this chapter, the incubus (Damian) finally agrees to let Britt join him on a hunt.

As this is a work in progress, I’d be very interested in hearing what you think.

As much as Damian feared the consequences of inviting Britt to the hunt, he was tired of downplaying it, tired of Britt’s look of long-suffering resignation whenever he left during the night. It was a gamble. She might understand it, see the necessity of it, but she might also be appalled.

He had no way of knowing.

He asked Kat for her advice, and for once she was stumped. Together, they’d weighed the most likely outcomes.

“She might end up hating me,” he said.

“Or she might understand that what you do, however distasteful, has a function.”

“There’s no light without darkness.”

“Something like that.”

“She won’t understand that there’s no intimacy in what I do.”

“She may. She’s smart. She’ll see the difference.”

“Do you think so?”

Kat shrugged. “I don’t know.”

It was a wash.

After Britt and Dan had eaten their supper, he pulled Britt aside.

“If you’re still intent on it, you’ll accompany me tonight.”

Britt looked as though she hadn’t really expected this moment to come. She hesitated and Damian hoped that she might change her mind. Uncertainty seeped out from around the self-control she was now exercising.

“You don’t have to do this,” said Damian. “There’s no unseeing what you’ll witness tonight.”

She nodded. She understood. “I’ll be ready.”

“As you wish,” said Damian with a sigh.

After tonight, nothing would be the same.

* * *

The drive seemed endless to Britt. Damian was quiet, preoccupied. She tried to hold his hand for reassurance but the need to shift gears in the car made it impractical. Instead, her hands lay in her lap and she questioned her decision to join him on the hunt. Some things were better left unknown.

“Where are we going?” she asked to break the silence.

“I know a place,” said Damian, evasively.

“You’ve been there before?”

“Yes,” he said. “I first met her a few months ago.”

Met, thought Britt. It sounded so innocent, like a chance encounter. Maybe it had been just that: a chance encounter. But then, more likely Damian had hunted her, sought her out.

“She responded to me,” said Damian, as if reading Britt’s thoughts. “She invited me. I don’t go where I’m not invited.”

“Good, then,” she said.

They wound their way through the suburbs not too far from the university and eventually stopped on a fairly affluent street of larger bungalows. Damian turned the key and the engine ticked, cooling.

“Are you sure about this?” he asked.

Britt nodded in the darkness. “Let’s do it.”

Damian vanished and a moment later the front door opened. Damian ushered Britt into the silent home. She was keenly aware of the intrusion and felt dirty. Damian might claim that he was always invited, but she couldn’t believe that he was wanted.

Britt didn’t need to be told to be quiet. Without a word, she followed Damian down the hall to the bedroom.

A woman lay in bed. Britt judged her to be a little north of forty. From what she could see, the woman had eased well into her years, with the kind of body won from hours in the gym and careful attention to diet. She wasn’t what Britt had expected. She’d pictured someone younger, immature, sexually needy. Surely this woman would have no absence of suitors. How was it that she had attracted an incubus?

Last chance. The thought popped into her mind, courtesy of Damian. You could wait outside.

I want to see, thought Britt, although now that she was here, she wasn’t so sure anymore. She glanced again at the figure in the bed. Damian’s victim, she told herself. And she was here, and while not aiding and abetting him, she was certainly not stopping him either. A sin would be committed here tonight… perhaps even a crime, despite Damian’s insistence that he’d been invited on some level. Still, did that make her an accomplice?

Damian turned from her, morphing as he did into the demon she knew. Familiarity with his form had robbed it of its terrifying aspect. Until now.

He looked larger than normal, perhaps due to the ebony scythes that arced out of his head. What little light there was in the room revealed the umber cast of his skin. Nubs appeared on his shoulders where his wings might appear. They didn’t, buy the flesh roiled beneath the skin.

With one last glance to Britt, he bent over the sleeping woman. “I am here,” he said.

The dance had started and Britt backed up against the wall, not trusting herself to stand.

The woman turned to the sound of Damian’s voice and opened her eyes. There was a flash of fear but it passed so quickly that Britt wasn’t sure that she’d seen it at all.

The woman rolled onto her back and extended her arms to Damian with a sleepy smile. Britt could see and sense the woman’s confidence and familiarity. She’d done this before. She’d been expecting this.

Damian frowned and Britt could sense his displeasure, as though the woman’s welcome had insulted him somehow.

He ignored the invitation to embrace. Instead, he leaned over and placed two hands on her — one between her legs and the other, a moment later, on her throat. The first elicited an immediate moan of anticipation; the second a gasp of apprehension. Both hands pressed down and the bed gave a little under the weight. It was the second hand, the one positioned so that it could easily snuff out her life, that re-established their roles. Britt could detect fear in the woman’s eyes now.

Damian nodded, satisfied. He eased up a little and said, “This time I have something special for you. An audience.”

The woman turned to follow Damian’s gaze and noticed Britt for the first time. She looked uncomprehending for a moment and then turned her attention back to the incubus. Britt wondered whether the woman was still sleeping or merely enthralled. Perhaps she was both.

It didn’t matter. This time the woman was performing for more than Damian and she seemed content with that.

Damian removed his hands from her entirely and swept the covers away. The woman was nude, as though she’d been waiting for him. She knelt on the bed and reached for Damian again, but this time as a supplicant. It was an intimate gesture, as though she were welcoming a lover.

I don’t want to be here, thought Britt, but her feet remained rooted in place.

The woman eased to the edge of the bed. Her trembling fingers undid the button of Damian’s pants and pushed them down to his feet. Her hands found his cock and she stroked it gently with her fingertips. She smiled slightly with carnal expectation as it responded to her.

Britt wanted to look away but there was little else in the room that could hold her attention. Why did I come here? she thought.

The woman held Damian’s now rigid cock as though it were the most precious thing in her world. She stroked it in the same way Britt had done so many times, fingers rippling over its taut and thickly veined surface.

Damian grasped the woman by the sides of her head and brought her face to his groin. She’d been expecting it and her mouth opened eagerly to meet him.

The room soon filled with the sounds of wet sucking, moans and whimpers as she took him, throat distending to accommodate his length and girth. A thread of saliva quivered from the woman’s chin and dropped to her breasts. She moved her head from side to side, brushing her nose against Damian’s coarse pubic hair.

Damian glanced at Britt and frowned. “Enough,” he said finally.

The woman sat back on her feet and looked up at him expectantly, as if waiting for some reward.

He eased her onto her back and positioned himself between her legs. His cock nuzzled the soft, glistening petals of her cunt and she opened her legs wider in invitation.

Britt wanted to look away but couldn’t.

Slowly, Damian lowered himself and Britt watched as the woman stretched to accommodate him as his thick shaft disappeared within her.

The woman gasped as Damian thrust home the last inch. He was now completely buried within her and the woman’s fingernails pressed into the small of Damian’s back.

The woman’s mindless desire swirled like a thick fog in the bedroom and Britt fought not to lose herself in it. It was uncomfortably arousing watching this woman sate her hunger while at the same time allowing the seeds of her dissoluteness to be sown. Britt was disgusted to feel her own panties dampening in response to the scene before her.

Britt hugged herself in the corner, deeply shaken and aroused, but not able to look away. The woman’s breasts rocked with each of Damian’s thrusts and an animal whimper escaped her throat as she careened to the oblivion of release.

Britt recognized the sounds. She’d made many of them herself. The gasping breaths, the tight exhalations. The sounds of surrender.

A loud gasp announced the woman’s climax. She writhed beneath Damian, pinned to the bed by his weight and thrusting cock. Her arms stretched out at her sides as though she were being crucified and her chest heaved.

“You’ll not see me again,” said Damian. It wasn’t so much the words but the tone of them that chilled the room. The words were uttered in such a cold, off-handed manner, so indifferent, that even Britt shivered.

The woman continued to moan until Damian’s words registered. Then her eyes widened. “No,” she whispered.

But Damian wasn’t listening. He inhaled sharply and his eyes closed. Britt didn’t have to be communing with him to sense the sudden surge in his power. He had awakened the woman’s lust; now he owned her dread. She’d won her release but she’d lost something infinitely more valuable. Britt glanced at the woman and sensed her abject fear at losing what she had come to crave and desolation that what she had sacrificed hadn’t been enough.

Damian slipped his length out of her and Britt could feel the woman’s terrible emptiness.

“No,” said the woman, more loudly.

Damian glanced at Britt and gave the slightest of nods. It was done. He was sated but his face revealed a look of desolation. Perhaps it mirrored Britt’s own.

He turned back to the woman, now sobbing quietly on the bed. “Sleep,” he whispered.

The woman immediately grew quiet.

* * *

There was no conversation until they were well away from the woman’s house. Britt felt numb.

“So that’s how it is?” asked Britt finally.

“I didn’t want you there,” said Damian.

More silence. Damian flicked on the radio. Some maladjusted autotuned brat millionaire warbled repetitively about something Britt couldn’t care less about. Damian usually listened to jazz, but he was somewhere else, clearly not hearing what he would otherwise never tolerate. She turned off the radio and for a while listened to the hum of rubber on asphalt.

He was right, but Britt wasn’t about to admit it. Damian’s mood was black when it should have been lighter. Her presence had made it that way. “And now?”

“And now I feel like shit. Guilty. Happy? Is that what you wanted?”

“No. I just…”

“I know. You just wanted to see if it was as bad as you imagined or whether by some miracle what I was doing was some kind of victimless crime. But you knew deep down that that it couldn’t be. You couldn’t just leave it alone, just like you’ll always poke a tooth that’s sore just to make sure it still hurts. Does it still hurt?”

“Yes.”

“It means nothing, Britt. It looks like intimacy but it’s not. What we — the two of us — share is intimacy. Back there, that was nothing.”

“Not to her.”

“Jesus! She invited me to do it. She drew me. She didn’t care about the consequences.”

“What happens to her now?”

“How the fuck do I know? She finds God or the gutter. The choice is hers.”

Britt had never seen Damian so angry. Neither had she understood the bleakness of his existence.